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I have no idea what these things are called but I am sure there must have been a brand name for them. My mom says they are called “viewers” but doesn’t know of any other name for them. Back then you could have them made for a nominal fee at any vacation destination. We have them from places in upstate New York (in the so-called “Borscht Belt”) to Miami Beach, FL. My grandmother has kept some of these for about 40 years never looking at them and we just recently dug them up. In fact, when my nephews and niece were in town recently they almost lost the picture that you see below on the floor as they were running around my mom’s house with these viewers (the white part of that Viewer is very loose and easy to open).

The mini photo which you can see in the opened pink "viewer" above closed and held up to the light. That's my grandparents and another couple.

These things took about a day to ‘develop’ or have made and then you could pick them up from the photographer afterward. Some of them, as you can see in the collection above, were branded but most of them weren’t (judging by the collection I have). The one that is branded is from the “Homowack Lodge” which was in Springfield/Sullivan County, NY and was part of the aforementioned Borscht Belt.

One of the other Viewers I found has a really old picture of my mom and dad from way back in the day. I am guessing it is from the mid 1970’s because there are also pictures of my oldest brother as a baby but not my brother directly older than me. I wonder if I can blow these pictures up to full size. Maybe I’ll take them into a store that specializes in such photos and development (and not just taking it to a Shoppers’ Drug Mart photo development section) and they’ll be able to tell me.

Viewer held up to the light with my mom and dad in the picture in the mid 1970's. So cool!

What’s also amazing about how these things “work” is that the picture becomes so much clearer the closer you bring it to the light and the brighter the light is at which which you aim it. I wonder how difficult it is for someone with glasses to look through one these. Ah, those were such quaint times!

Does anyone have any idea what these things are actually called? There must be a real name for them.

Clicking this image above will take you to the older post from January 18, 2011. But this is the specific aspect of that post I will be discussing in this post.

A bunch of people between Twitter and in the Comments of the original post agreed with me on the issue and my solutions. However, I personally had no way of trying to get this implemented or even making Facebook aware of our feelings on the issue until this week. This week in Toronto, and around the world is Social Media Week and all week in multiple cities there have been talks and panels and workshops about social media and the use of it from all different aspects – there’s also been a bunch of parties one of which organized by the group #GenYTO I will be heading to shortly after finishing this post.

At an event Wednesday morning called “How to be “LIKEABLE”” on Facebook” which I was hosted by Matchstick Inc. as part of their Forum Series and who generously invited me and a friend. The event was described as a couple of presentations which “explore the topics of how to garner a brand following and generate meaningful content for your online community” on Facebook and social media in general included a talk from Alfredo Tan of Facebook Canada. The whole thing was extremely interesting and I learned a lot from it but at the end I got to have a little face to face with a Facebook Canada employee. This was my chance to mention my concerns as laid out in the January 18 post directly ‘to Facebook’ and I did.

The answer I received was honestly somewhat disappointing. I don’t blame Alfredo for the answer he gave me, he is a very nice and personable guy and he was probably just quoting Facebook’s stance on the issue (I guess they have already given this thought). Basically he said it is very low on their list of things to do for a number of reasons:

Allowing this would ruin the ‘real time’ aspect of Facebook photo tagging and that goes against what Facebook – and social media in general – is aspiring to do. They want to give users a real time experience as well as they can.

If you are so worried about the wrong people seeing the wrong pictures of you, you can set it so no one can see photos you are tagged in.

You can set up a list of people who can see photos of you and people who cannot.

While I understand Facebook’s position on the matter from a business perspective – especially the desire to give users a real time experience. I completely agree that I do also want a ‘real time experience’ as well. However, I don’t personally care if it is real time when I am not around to be a custodian of my online identity because I am asleep but, hey, nothing is perfect. Nevertheless, it is what it is and I thought people would be interested to hear the follow up.

I think the only way to achieve the stopgap without Facebook giving us the option – and this sounds ridiculously insane, I know – would be to “Deactivate” your Facebook account when you aren’t around to watch over it. The reason why it would work is that even when you “Deactivate” your Facebook account it doesn’t actually get deleted it just sits there until you “reactivate” it. Your whole profile including pictures and friends and posts and messages is still saved in Facebook’s servers waiting for you to come back and reactivate (although it supposedly will not be able to bring everything back immediately). The reason this is completely an insane solution is because it also means that people will not be able to send you Facebook Messages (and I know A LOT of people who don’t email their friends and prefer to communicate with them solely through Facebook Messages), look at your photos, comment on your photos, tag you in posts, invite you to events, make you a Facebook Friend (if it is someone you just recently met or just joined Facebook), or do any of the other interactive things Facebook allows you to do with your friends.

The above ‘solution’ is obviously a terrible one and that’s why I put the word solution in quotes. The only reason I’m just proposing it is if you REALLY don’t want to make huge lists of people who can & can’t see your tagged photos or turn off the ability of being able to be tagged in photos entirely while still maintaining a Facebook presence that seems to be the only one right now.

Current Facebook Privacy Options only allow you to set who can SEE tagged photos & videos of you

In the post “Simple Things About Facebook That Need Changing!” from August 9, 2009 I talked about a number of things centered around the message inbox & events that I thought Facebook needed to change to make their users’ experience more enjoyable. I know Facebook has made changes to the inbox in late 2010 but on my account I do not have the changes implemented yet. However, as far as I know, they have not put into place the changes I suggested a year and a half ago. Either way, I have some more changes that I feel Facebook needs to make and I actually feel even more strongly about these. These changes were relevant when I wrote that first post, I just hadn’t thought of them yet. It is just as well, because I feel that with the new profile pages showcasing the 5 most recently tagged pictures of you at the top this issue has become even more relevant. The content of this post has been banging around my head for a while but over the past week I had a discussion with my friend Jonathan about this and I decided I was finally going to write about it.

The Problem, A Solution, & An Annoying Result Of The Status Quo

People’s profiles on social media sites have become hot topics recently. There have been stories and articles about people caught cheating on schoolwork, people not getting hired, people getting fired from jobs, people being evicted, and even getting caught lying in attempts to avoid national conscription. It is obviously very important to have a handle on the privacy settings and options of our profiles on social media sites like Facebook. One of the major issues I have seen with Facebook specifically is in the options available to us to control pictures and videos being tagged on Facebook. Currently, we are only able to (as shown above) decide who amongst your friends, network, and the general public can see the photos and videos in which you’re tagged. We cannot, however, decide who can actually DO the tagging of us on Facebook. If we are friends with a person on Facebook, they can tag us in any picture or photo or video they please. This is something that must change. Facebook must IMPLEMENT A SETTING ALLOWING USERS CONTROL OVER WHO CAN AND CANNOT TAG THEM in pictures and videos. That is, unless Facebook decides to implement my second suggestion of tag management which I will get to below.

People who have also began to use this to their advantage and most people’s annoyance are promoters and organizers of parties and events. I have begun to notice a trend of being tagged in images of flyers for events where I’m not actually in the picture and it is actually a poster for the event. It’s the new tactic for promoters of parties and events to tag us in their event posters uploaded onto Facebook as opposed to merely inviting us to the event. This serves the purpose of not only getting the information about the event out to us but it also shows up on our Facebook news feeds so everyone else we are friends with sees the event to as it is shows up as a photo that has been tagged of us. An example of this type of tagging I have taken a screenshot of below.

Event Flyer uploaded & tagged on Facebook as if it was a real photo.

One of the most ironic things about the picture is that the person who posted this event advertisement and tagged all those people so doesn’t want his privacy compromised that he doesn’t have his full name on Facebook. Instead he prefers to remain on the site only identified with the last name “Br” which are the first two letters of his last name. I also chose his name to hover my mouse over to highlight what they are tagging. Cyrille Br is a guy, he is definitely NOT that model.

Another Solution

The other solution is somewhat close to the first one in that it allows more control over who tags you and where you are tagged. This method, however, acts as more of a stopgap to inappropriate tagging than a preventative. Basically, Facebook should allow you to turn on a setting where any time someone tags you in a photo or video on the site YOU GET TO APPROVE IT BEFORE IT GOES PUBLIC.

No longer will you wake up and find out the pictures from the wild party you went to last night have been uploaded to Facebook with you tagged in them and you hurriedly untag them hoping no one you know has seen them. Or, even worse, you wake up and find those same pictures uploaded only in this case 83 people – including your family, co-workers, and superiors – have already commented on them (or even worse, maybe it’s the phone call from your outraged significant other, parent, or grandparent that woke you in the first place).

Personally I like this second solution better than the first as it is just one click solution from the user standpoint and we won’t have to start dividing friends into lists of who can and who cannot tag us. It also means we won’t ever have the problem of thinking we can trust someone not to tag something inappropriate only to find out way too late that we really can’t. Removing them from the ‘trusted’ list at that point wouldn’t really help in the here and now.